Preface
In my experience as a cloud architect in the past few years, I worked with many customers – companies from small to large, public and private, innovative and conservative. Each of them had their own idea in mind of what the cloud could mean for their business, which is the right approach, but none of them knew for certain what to do once they got in the cloud.
One of the most difficult conversations with a customer approaching the cloud revolves around how this new technology is changing some of the roles of IT, sometimes through simple adaptive learning by acquiring the new technology skills, and sometimes through a tough transformation by adding roles that a company didn't need or know about before, such as the role of buying cloud services. This is the case with the cloud cost manager, the owner of cloud billing. It's a very specific role that in the past might have resembled that of a finance controller, but today requires technical skills to understand metering, automation, and services, and especially to know what is essential to the IT core and what can be switched off or swapped.
If you are reading this book and have been wondering who takes care of cloud spending, it is a new breed of technical experts. They are not only very skilled in IT infrastructure, design patterns, frameworks, and architectures, and capable of understanding cloud trends and innovation, but are also fluent in finance, costs, and meters, understand the principles of cloud services, and are able to sustain a tough conversation with the company's finance team and sometimes the CEO. In this book, we will learn about the Azure cloud billing process and how to govern that process with your own optimization patterns and automation, so that surprises in the monthly bill are reduced to a minimum and cloud spending becomes part of the company's finance operations with ease.
In the first section of the book, we'll start by learning how to read the monthly bill and understand all the monitoring and control options that Azure offers, along with how to organize your cloud resources to match your company's spending hierarchy. The second section is dedicated to cost-saving techniques: from right-sizing your workloads (either Azure IaaS or PaaS) to cleaning up unused services, to the reservations process. The final section is dedicated to optimizing your application and database with the goal of reducing infrastructural costs.
The purpose of this book is to familiarize yourself with Azure cloud billing and all the steps needed to embrace the public cloud spending with new governance and continuous optimization processes that will bring clarity and governance across all the company's departments and applications.